Module Information

The module 'Experimental Cinema' introduces students to a vital area of non-mainstream film production, paying close attention to particular key movements and practices the 1920s to the present. It aims to provide students with a wide-ranging knowledge of the different ways in which artists and filmmakers have challednged the narrative and stylistic convention of mainstream (particularly Hollywood) cinema. As well as developing an understanding of experimental cinema as a counter-cultural art form, students will also be encouraged to think about the ways that experimental aesthetics have been appropriated by, and thus have fed back into, mainstream cultural production. Students will be exposed to a wide range of alternative films and associated theoretical concepts such as 'pure cinema', 'structural film', 'found footage' and 'materialist film'. The module will engage with the way experimental forms of filmmaking are positioned within, contribute to, and draw inspiration from artistic movements such as Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism, Fluxus and Situationism. Students will therefore be encouraged to consider these films in relation to other art forms such as painting, photography and poetry. Close attention will be paid towards the end of the module, to contemporary debates around spaces of reception, particularly the relationship between the institutions of the cinema and the gallery, and the economic factors involved in the emergence of 'artists' film. The module will also critically assess the aesthetic and institutional shifts in experimental film production with the rise of digital technology, looking specifically at the different ways in which filmmakers have responded to the threat to celluloid-based production by (re-)embracing materiality. The module will concentrate on some of themost important figures in the development of experimental film aesthetics such as Man Ray, Hans Richter, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Chantal Akerman and Martin Arnold. It will also look at lesser-known and emerging contemporary filmmakers, particularly those working at the intersection of the cinema and the gallery space.